Ol’Factory Pils
1 12 oz bottle, $1.89++, 5% ABV
Purchased at Harvest Wine and Spirits, West Hartford
Points off the bat for the name.
Unless you, y’know, think about it for a second. Do old factories smell nice? Do breweries smell nice? Do pilsners smell particularly nice?
Nope, Nope, Nope. Regardless, I like the name.
Two Roads Says:
Traditional in concept with a Two Roads twist…dry hops. We use a combination of classic German as well as American hop and malt varieties in our Pils. We renovated a 100 year-old factory building and designed this Pils to have “extra” aroma…so, pardon the pun! Crisp…refreshing…refined.
No sir, I will NOT pardon the pun. I will celebrate it and revel in it. Geeze, it’s like Two Roads hasn’t read anything on CTMQ before.
The Two Roads “thing” is to put slight twists on classic styles. They don’t do it for every beer in the strictest sense, but they clearly have a good handle on their marketing plan and they’ve been executing it flawlessly since their opening. Some of their twists don’t really make much sense to me, but this one does.
Pilsners are pretty boring and often maligned as not really “crafty” enough. And while I agree with that sentiment, I’ve come to find a few that are actually good – New England Brewing’s Elm City springs to mind.
The Two Roads version has a hop bitterness and a slight hop finish that sort of makes it not a pils pils, but that’s who Two Roads rolls. It doesn’t make it great, but it makes it better than your every day pilsner. No doubt about that.
But since this beer invokes the “old factory” Two Roads retrofitted, let’s talk about that for a minute. It is called the US Baird buiding.
I love the fact that they made this move. It’s great for Stratford and it’s great for showing how these old buildings can be repurposed instead of left to rot or just demolished. The partners behind the brewery bought the property for $2.85 million dollars. I’m sure it would have been cheaper for them to knock it down, but they didn’t. Chapeau.
For an impressive 164 years, the US Baird Corporation had been the builders of high production machinery. It was a leader in high speed production commercial equipment, which served the automotive, electronic, electrical, medical and battery industries as well as cosmetic sectors.
The merged with another company and moved their scaled down operations up to Torrington. And now Stratford has a brand new gigantor brewery. It’s quite amazing what the Two Roads team did with the place – and amazing how much money is poured into it. Somewhere north of 15 million bucks is what I’ve heard from a very reliable source. Oof.
So it’s pretty great that their six-packs and bombers are so dang cheap. I just wish their beers were a little more aggressive, but eh… I’ve got other smaller breweries for that.
Overall Rating: B
Rating vs. Similar style: A
Two Roads Brewing Company
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